I’m 38…which really isn’t all that old, unless you happen to be standing up in the morning, or trying to play a MMORPG, or making your yearly trip to the doctor and being informed that there is a new test that you have to get used to them performing regularly…

…or when you find yourself saying something that begins with “ya know…when I was a kid…”

That’s when you find yourself in the middle of a suburban home wondering when your misspent youth managed to turn into a storied, stayed sort of whitebread middle-age.

But here we go.  It’s the circle of life.

When I was a kid, we had several different brands of something called a “Variety Show.”  I’m not sure exactly where these came from, but I suspect that they were the national version of the local “recitation”, or “talent show” or “community program”.  They probably also have had some of their roots trailing from the fertile soil of vaudeville.

They included, The Ed Sullivan Show (which was before my time) but I grew up watching The Laurance Welk Show, Hee-Haw, Sonny and Cher, The Mandrel Sisters, to name a few.

Of course, the best one was a little show called “The Muppet Show”…which I miss.  I didn’t ever care for the movies…but the weekly variety show was wonderful.

In a variety show, you saw several different kinds of entertainment in the course of a half hour; different kinds of music, skits, celebrities, etc.

Not all of it was good.  Some of it was bad.  Much of it was not what you might have expected going in.  Some of it was not something you would have sought out on your own and listened to…but often ended up surprising you.

Oftentimes, you would find yourself listening to combinations you never would have expected.  Country and rock singers doing duets, jam sessions between groups you would never have thought could work together.

You’d hear patriotic music and gospel music and protest music and silly little songs, and folk music and rock and roll in the same show.  Maybe you didn’t like it all, but you heard it, and you knew the names of the people performing it, and if someone said they liked a particular artist, you could relate to them because you remembered seeing them perform and could say what you really thought.

A lot of it was cheesy and silly, some of it was terrible, and some of it was just not for me…but in the end, I find that I miss the variety show.

It brought all sorts of different people and music and humor and viewpoints together in one place once a week and sort of turned unity and diversity into a mild mish-mash that entertained everyone, old, young, urban, rural, liberal, conservative, rich, poor, alike.

You never knew what you were going to get.  Everyone understood that not everything on a variety show would “hit”.  Misses were part of the charm.  Experimentation was part of the formula, and it was just understood that you were passing your time and took what came out of the process…the good, the bad, and the truly spectacular.

I hadn’t thought of this in years…until I started listing the music I liked, and old names started to come back to me.  Dolly Parton, John Denver, Frank Yankovich (no relation to Weird Al).  I realized that there were tons of artists over the decades that were part of my formative music years that I remembered fondly and enjoyed, even though I never really thought of them, never bought an album by them, never hear them on the radio, and never would seek them out to listen to…

…would never have heard if it hadn’t been for the Variety Show genre.