Once There was a Spot

 

Richard Harris as Arthur in the final scene of the 1967 motion picture version of Camelot. The boy is Tom of Warwick, a stowaway. Although it is not explicitly stated, he might be intended to be Thomas Malory, author of Le Morte d'Arthur. 

Tonight on my show I broke down crying--twice, in fact, over the same thing. (link)

It was not over the fact that technically it was my most problematic broadcast to date, out of the 95 episodes I have done during the last two years. First off, I had barely finished preparations before showtime, one of my closest scrapes yet in that regard. I had just finished uploading this week's intro video--about eight minutes long, made in the two hours leading up to broadcast, and had just put the finishing touches on my Keynote slides (my notes without which I am lost), when I looked up and saw by my laptop clock that was bang 5:30 exactly. So I pressed the "Go Live" button on Streamyard and waited to hear the intro background music on the live feed from my desktop. 

Usually that is how I tell if my audience can hear me, by my desktop computer, by earbuds connected to my desktop computer, which passively receives the broadcast as if I am a live viewer of my own show. This week, however, I had been vexed by the web browser on my desktop---I had to restart twicee and it was stubborning refusing to load up Rumble. The page was freezing.

So wasting a minute, I had booted up Rumble on my iPhone browser, to accomplish the same goal. Right at the last minute, literally, the desktop browser began working and so I put the iPhone aside on my desk, with my show playing on it as well the desktop. I have never done this step before, using my iPhone but it saved the show this week.

I played this week's intro video as usual. The right after I came on the air, I realized my Yeti standalone microphone was not working.  The quick fix didn't work, so even though the audience could see me, I was dead in the water as far as audio (which is always more important than video). Then, an even bigger disaster struck. Our home Internet went out. Jessica yelled it from the next room. She saw our router had gone down and was rebooting. There was nothing to do but wait. 

Viewers saw a frozen image of me and no sound. I was helpless, I thought. Then I remembered, I had booted up Rumble on my iPhone and I could see the live chat scrolling there. This was because my iPhone was using the phone network, which was working fine. I jumped into chat and told my audience about my wi-fi  being out, hoping at least a few of them would stick around while I overcame my technical difficulties.

I was off the air for ten minutes at least. To my surprise people who were in the chat hung in there and most seemed to be still listening when the router finished rebooting and the wifi came back. I reloaded the Streamyard page and things resumed again.  A great lesson in coping with live disasters on air.

I had figured that losing wi-fi during a live broadcast would happen to me one day. I almost had to cancel a broadcast last spring because our Internet was out for almost an entire morning and afternoon leading up to the show. But it came back just in time before I had to send the final cancellation message to the Badlands tech people, and more importantly the ad folks, who would have to be notified about the fact that sponsors should not be charged for the ads that didn't run (it's always top priority to get the sponsors into the show). One must be a professional.

When I came back on air this week I was giddy with laughter. All seemed to be well again for the moment. One of my longtime viewers even commented that it was "your best opening ever." Several folks even sent me money via "Rumble rants" during the time I was off the air! 

I was expecting the wi-fi to fail again at any moment, and dreaded what I would have to do at that point, but the network held fast for the rest of the show.  Because of the delay the broadcast wound up running a little bit longer than I wanted, almost to eighty-five minutes out of the ninety I have available to me. But I got through all the material I wanted to cover.

So why did I break down in tears live on the air, two separate times? 

Perhaps all this disaster recovery had me a little euphoric. The topic of the show was that Camelot is back. By that I mean the feeling of the era of the Kennedy Administration, and the 1960s at least up to the assassination of Bobby Kennedy in June 1968. My opening video this week was about that, in facct, and used clips of the Kennedys including Jackie giving a White House tour, interspersed with footage from the Broadway show Camelot, and of Richard Burton, Julie Andrews, and Robert Goulet performing numbers on  the Ed Sulllivan show in 1961, and then clips from the 1967 motion picture starring Richard Harris, and Vanessa Redgrave. 

The original Broadway show ran from just before Kennedy's inauguration in Jan 1961 until about ten months before he was assassinated in 1963. The movie came out right before Robert Kennedy began running for president (which led to his assassination in the spring).

Today everyone associated the stage production and movie, and the concept of Camelot in Arthurian legends, with the Kennedy Era, I told my audience I was not alive for Jack's presidency but that "Camelot" as an era lasted from Jan 1961 until Bobby's death in June 1968. I remember it, I told my audience. "I remember how it felt...and I'm telling you this now, today, feels like Camelot again. It feels like we have gotten back there at last."

I read to my a report of the origins of how the Broadway show became identified with Kennedy. I found it online and seemed credible. It happened only after Jack's death and it was entirely due to Jackie. Two weeks after Jack's death, Life magazine published a special edition covering the funeral, and the Kennedy presidency. The last article in the magazine was by the historian Theodore H. White, who had won the Pulitzer Prize for his book The Making of the President 1960, which he wrote covering the entire election, including Kennedy's campaign. Now he was writing the "epilogue" to that presidency for Life magazine. He interviewed Jackie, who told him that Jack had a copy of the Broadway cast recording of Camelot, as did many Americans. By the way, Theodore H. White is no relation to T. H. White who wrote The Once and Future King, upon which the Lerner and Loewe Broadway show was based.

from the article by (Theodore H.) White.

In the December 9th, 1963 issue of Life Magazine, published just a matter of days after President Kennedy's assassination, Theodore H. White wrote one of several articles about the event and all that immediately followed. The final piece in the issue was titled "For President Kennedy, An Epilogue", and in it came the roots of the "Camelot" myth.

Mrs. Kennedy was quoted as saying:

"When Jack quoted something, it was usually classical, but I'm so ashamed of myself, all I keep thinking of is this line from a musical comedy. At night, before we'd go to sleep, Jack liked to play some records; and the song he loved most came at the very end of this record. The lines he loved to hear were: Don't let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot."

She went on: "Once, the more I read of history, the more bitter I got. For a while, I thought history was something that bitter old men wrote. But then I realized history made Jack what he was. You must think of him as this little boy, sick so much of the time, reading in bed, reading history, reading the Knights of the Round Table, reading Marlborough. For Jack, history was full of heroes. And if it made him this way -- if it made him see the heroes -- maybe other little boys will see. Men are such a combination of good and bad. Jack had this hero idea of history, the idealistic view."

She returned to quote the musical again: "Don't let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot -- and it will never be that way again."

Reading that lyric Jackie quoted, my voice broke and my eyes got visibly misty. It was too much. 

I also broke down when telling my audience he significance of the clip from the movie, in the final scene, which Richard Harris as Arthur, on the eve of the battle in which knows he will perish, telling a young stowaway that despite his desire to join the Knights of the Round Table, he cannot be warrior in battle the next day. Instead he must survive, and live out his life, and tell people in the future what Camelot truly meant. 

I know the older members of my audience knew what it all meant, the tears. How long have waited for the return of what we once had. And now, for the moment at least, it feels like Camelot is in sight. The Knights of the Round Table are gathering again. There is heroism in the air, like there hasn't been in a long time. What seemed impossible now feels possible.

I'm taking next week off from the show, because we'll be traveling for Thanksgiving. After tonight, I truly feel like I deserve it.