v :w V a i w 9 Wednesday, November6 ' / S ement 7B Personal Statement: What it really means to be gone ann arbor affairs: why i'm smitten with 'SNL' BY ERIKA HARWOOD Ican't really recall the specif- ics of my first time - but I do remember loving it. It happened in the middle of the day, around 1 p.m. I was perched on the edge of my couch, dazed with anticipation because it was finally, after all those years, happening. My parents - in an attempt at "parenting" - never let me watch "Saturday Night Live" when I was a kid. I'm an only child and they had me at a rather ripe age, so while they wereI pretty lax about most things, they liked to crack down on my TV habits. Up until third or v fourth grade, I almost exclusively watched TV Land - not because. they made me, but . because I genuinely and wholeheartedly loved it. My biggest only-child quirk is that I was basi- cally raised tobe some- ILLUSTR one who was born in 1955, which may also account for my typically grumpy disposition. At the age of six, I could give you a season-by-season account of "The Brady Bunch," sing the theme song to "Green Acres" on cue and go on for hours about why Eddie Haskell was a real piece of shit. The one show that trumped them all though was "I Love Lucy" - and I didn't have to explicitly tell you that to make it clear. I watched it with psychopathic intensity and collected any and all paraphernalia I came across. I had books, orna- ments that lit up and a VHS tape I took almost everywhere with me on the off chance there would be a VCR around (you know the '90s). I even buried my pet goldfish Lucky in an "I Love Lucy" themed mint tin labeled "Lucy's Predicamints." He was two years old and up until that* point in my life, his death was the biggest predicament I had faced, so it seemed like the right move. "I Love Lucy" was my gateway drug into a dangerous addiction to comedy. I'm thankful to this day that I grew up admiring funny women because now L ,have a very who- gives-a-shit attitude toward the "are women funny" debate. There's no THE WEEKLY REEL Fraternities Nlav football for awareness WATCH MORE AT MICHIGAN DAILY.COM T H E statement Magazine Editor: Photo Editor: Managing Editor: Carlina Duan Ruby Wallau Katie Burke Deputy Editors: lIlustrator: Copy Editors: Max Radwin Megan Mulholland Mark Ossolinski Amrutha Sivakumar Editor in Chief: Meaghan Thompson Design Editor: Peter Shahin Amy Mackens COVER BY AMY MACKENS ATIONS BY MEGAN MULHOLLAND question - just look at Lucille Ball. Also, this is 2014 - get it together. I spent the next formative years of my life reveling in anything that made me laugh, even if I didn't get it. I would watch movies like "Tommy Boy," "Groundhog Day" and "Cad- dyshack" with my dad, echoing his cackleswith added confusion. As my love for comedy developed, "Saturday Night Live" was always in the back of my mind. My dad would constantly reference old skits from the '70s and '80s and mention names I'd be familiar with like Steve Martin and John Belushi. Yet every time I brought it up, he'd shut down my wishes to watch it, telling me it wasn't appropriate for someone my age. There was no way around this., Our house was very open and I was afraid he'd hear the TV in the living room late at night. Also, I diln'treal- ly know how to operate the remote. It was mainly the latter holding me back. But then my parents got divorced and my dad had almost zero author- ity over me. OK, that's not true at all, but it was definitely a lot easier to peruse NBC's listings when I was only confronted with his televi- sion restrictions every other week- end, and my mom's attitude toward my pop culture interests became increasingly blase. So then it happened. The first time I watched "Saturday Night Live" was directly after I got home from seventh grade camp, which was a winter hellscape I thought I'd never return from. My mom bought me lunch and I parked my butt squarely in front of a TV tray and the E! network. It was a rerun airing in the middle of the day - a shortened, hour-longversion of an episode from the '90s. I don't remember the spe- cifics; I don't know who the host was or the musical guest, but I remember being completely engrossed by the cast. People like Will Ferrell, Rachel Dratch and Molly Shannon. From that point, I was all in. I watched every rerun on E! that I could, quot- ing sketches at every opportune (and inopportune) moment and citing Chris Kattan as my middle school crush - yes, the guy who played Mango. I started staying up until 11:30 p.m. each Saturday night in order to finally watch episodes in real time. This was the era of Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph and Kris- ten Wiig - I undoubtedly picked the right time to get into it. I would record each episode and rewatch them as often as I could, memoriz- ing lines and analyzing Weekend Update jokes - still not fully under- standing all of them. I'd make friends reenact my favorite skits (which were recorded on home videos I'm afraid to revisit) and embark on what I assume were excruciatingly long discussions on the past week's show. I was in love and Lorne Michaels was cupid. The affair accompanied me to col- lege, where I would frequently opt out of healthy social interactions in order to stay in and watch TV on Sat- urday nights. I was miserable - as most bratty18 year olds are - for the bulkofmyfreshmanyear,andwould relish in the moments I got to be by myself and watch "SNL." The show has changed alot since I started watching, and at times, I'm critical of it, but in the way a high school football coach from Texas is critical of his star quarterback. "SNL" is the reason I started writing and the reason I wasn't a bigger pain in the ass as a teenager. It's the rea- son I fell so deeply in love with com- edy - a feeling I've yet to shake years and years after that one afternoon on my couch. A village means to not be alone, to know that there's some- hing of you in the people, in the plants, and in the soil, that even when you are not there it waits to welcomeyou." - Cesare Pavese, "The Moon and the Bonfires" My grandmother died this year on a Monday night in September. My brother called me at work that night and told me she had been admitted to the University Hospi- tal. He said it was serious, so I left work, got on my bike and frantically pedaled over to the emergency room. She was already unconscious when I arrived, a respirator keeping her alive as the doctors and my aunts and uncles decided whether to turn off the machine. The aneu- rysm resting near her heart had finally burst, and there was nothing left to be done. They turned off the respira- tor. I watched her heart rate slowly drop to zero } on the monitor. I held n her hand as the doctor felt for a missing pulse. In a way, it seemed fitting that she should go on a Monday. Every week from when I was about five years old, I had spent Monday evenings sitting in the armchair on the left side of her living room, "America's Funniest Home Videos" playing on the TV while Iate bowls ofstrawberry Jell- O and butter pecan ice cream. Monday nights didn't vary too much from week to week. They started with opening the sliding door to her condo, being greeted by the smell of rosemary, the warmth of the stove, the pitcher of mint iced tea ready to be poured and she, looking very much like a little Ital- ian grandma in her purple blouse, pearl necklace and glasses, waiting for me to hand her the mail. In the evening, while I ate my Jell-O, she would sit in her reclin- er on the other side of the room, thumbing through a magazine or looking at old pictures. Between commercials, when both my broth- er and my dad had dozed off in their chairs, we would talk about her friends Rose and Diana, her latest bingo winnings at the senior center and about the new Spanish mass at her church. We would say goodbye at around 10 - a kiss for my dad, a hug for my brother and I - and as we pulled away she stood behind the glass of her sliding door, waving until we were out of view. When she died, I didn't have any regrets. Having spent four or five hours with her every week for the better part of 15 years, it wasn't like there was any dinner we could have had together, but didn't; any words we never got the chance to say. by Adam DePollo disjointed phrases, the faint residue of smells and sounds, a missing feel- ing of home. She was fading into the back- ground of faces from my childhood, becoming another one of the dead relatives lining the pages of our photo albums, turning into a set of anecdotal stories. She seemed, with each day, less and less like the per- son I knew, with all her affectations and complexities, and more like an ossified, idealized caricature of her- self. This was what it really meant for her to be gone. tion home by any of the Michigan DePollos willing to make the eight- hour drive. My friends and I stayed in her house for a few days, cooking piero- gies on her stove and watching her DVDs of "The Andy Griffith Show." My aunt used to call TV the "idiot box," which sounded more like "ijit box" in her West Virginia twang. She thought it was an unnecessary waste of time, which she preferred to spend spying on the neighbors through her windows and listen- ing for the slightest crackle coming from her police scanner. As I buttoned my pants and dried my hands, the uncle I never met smiling back at me through the glass, I felt myself trying to stifle a chuckle. It was a funny scene, after all. Here we were, the only DePol- A# los left in DePollo's Store, having a wordless conversation over a toilet. Maybe he was a pretty charming guy. Following the calendar, it was still summer when I was in Davis. But fall comes early in West Vir- ginia. At night, cool, moist airblows down from the mountaintop, con- densing into a thick fog when it meets the tree- lined roads warmed by the August sunshine. Our last night on the mountain was one of those foggy nights, when the air is thick and the houses are out of focus. Looking down into the mist from a win- dow in my Aunt Lucy's bedroom, I thought about what I would tell my grandmother when Q I got back to Michigan. I thought I would 4 tell her about meeting my uncle in the bath- room at DePollo's Store, about watching the "ijit box" in her sister's house, about the fog on the mountain, about the S- AD pierogies and almond brittle. I knew the stories she would tell me about her broth- er-in-law John. I could see the bit- tersweet smile that would come across her face when I told her about watching Aunt Lucy's TV. I could hear her laugh when she tried to picture me, the grandson that never learned to cook, burn- ing pierogies and setting off smoke detectors in her sister's kitchen. I didn't get to tell her about West Virginia before she died but, in a way, it didn't matter. In that moment, though she was 400 miles away, watching her last few episodes of "Dancing with the Stars" in a condo in Novi, I could- picture her with as much clarity as if she were in Lucy's bedroom with me, looking down into the fog-filled streets. In that mountaintop town in West Virginia, there's something of her that's much more real than an old face in a photo album. If anything, it had seemed in recent years that we were running out of things to say. She was 94 and it was getting harder for her to stay up talking until 10 o'clock. She start- ed repeating the same stories week after week, the TV filled up longer and longer silences. I hadn't spoken to her in three weeks before that last Monday night in September. In hindsight, she seemed to be slowly fading away. And after the funeral, after the out-of-town rela- tives had returned home, after the tearful remembrances and divvied up assets, she was gone. What bothered me was how dif- ferent this type of "gone" felt from simple absence. Even when I think of her now, I don't hear her voice or see her face. I remember the smell of warm rosemary, Tom Bergeron narrating crotch shots, tears drop- ping on a wrinkled hand hanging off the side of a hospital bed. A set of Three weeks before she died, I was driving with two friends on narrow mountain roads, listening to Biggie Smalls and eating almond brittle. We were 3,100 feet above sea level in Davis, West Virginia, the tiny coal mining town where my grandma grew up and where her younger sister Lucy retired after a long career sewing car seats at a Ford Motor Company factory in Detroit. Their parents had immi- grated to Davis from Sulmona, a small city in Italy's mountainous Abruzzo region, to join the commu- nity of expatriate Italians digging tunnels into the peaks around the town. Aunt Lucy had moved back into her parents' house in the '80s, but she died last spring and, since then, the precariously perched, sheet* metal-encased building was sitting empty, waitingto be used as a vaca- As I lay in her old bed, watch- ing a young Ron Howard cavort across the screen, I remembered that she had been learning to play the piano in her old age. She wasn't done being a person. I wondered if she had changed her mind about the "ijit box." On our last night in West Vir- ginia, we went to watch a five-piece band from Alabama play rockabilly at the Purple Fiddle, a cafe built in what was once my family's general store. I paid the $10 cover charge while looking at a sign resting over the hostess's shoulder, mixed in with the other antique odds and ends liningthe cafe's shelves. It read "DePollo's Store." An obituary for my great uncle John, the last DePollo to own the family store, was hanging in the cafe's bathroom. I never knew him, but my aunts and uncles always told me that he was a real lady-killer.