Flight

Homage to Dick Cavett:

I can't imagine that there's a huge fanbase for Dick Cavett, but if there is, I have realized I may be part of it. I have a link to his NY Times blog, "Talk Show", which from the first entry, I've followed with great interest and enjoyment. Others have too, with about 400-500 comments on each post as evidence. And unlike most sites that feature posted comments, these are a good read as well. With most things I read online, I've had to make myself not scroll down and ignore what people write because it's full of hateful, bigoted, polarized bullshit, but Cavett's post draws comments of nostalgia, regard, intelligent disagreement, and other such civilized responses.

Then there are the interviews from the various incarnations of his television show, which are wonderful, and I can't imagine anyone now, except maybe Letterman, who could sit with such varied guests and somehow allow such a seemingly true picture to come from it. Who else has hosted a very insightful, yet barely coherent Sly Stone and had Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal nearly come to blows on his nationally televised show. If you look at the clips of Cavett's interviews on You Tube, you see the best and brightest of his generation: not just politicians, not just pop stars, not just literary icons, but all of them.

Cavett isn't what I'd consider a movie star, though he's been in many. The first one I saw him in was Beetlejuice, playing an art agent for Delia Deets's strange and supernatural sculpture. He delivers a perfect deadpan line as he's leaving the dinner party after having been possessed by Harry Belefonte's Bananna Boat Song about how as Delia's agent he's consistently lost money on her so he can tell her frankly and honestly that if she wants to scare people she should do it with her art. It's great comedy and so subtle it's easily missed, very much the way Cavett himself is overlooked.

When I was a kid, I was fascinated by airplanes and flight. Early on it was only with military airplanes. I have a cousin, David, who I was close to growing up, whose dad had been an F-100 pilot in Vietnam and was shot down and killed when David was two years old. I think because of this, he threw himself into the subject of military aircraft. He taught me to notice the small differences between planes so that I could tell them apart and understand their purpose. I read books he gave me and we built plastic models together and so began my education on aviation. David was a very talented artist, and his models were very precise reproductions. I remember the pride he felt after completing a large model of an F-100 that had the same squadron markings on the tail as his father's. I remember him using a toothbrush to paint in the blackened cannon ports under the nose. I remember it being a solemn moment when he hung it from the ceiling of his basement room with fishing line. And I remember sensing his grief because it didn't bring him any closer to knowing his dad.

But I think the beginngs of my shift from duty filled patriot child of the cold war to a 21st century pacifist, began with looking outside aircraft as a military application and seeing flying as a near spiritual pursuit, which happened watching a documentary as a kid in the early 80's on the history of flight, narrated by Dick Cavett. It started with the legend of Icarus, then the balloons and gliders of the 18th and 19th centuries, the crazy designs of early motorized attempts, moving to Samuel Langley's Aerodrome which failed with much publicity only a week before the Wright Brother's quietly successful flight at Kitty Hawk. It was about the human desire to rise above the earthly plane. Not about raining down death from above. And all of it was explained by Cavett's calm and comforting voice.

The last scene was a man snow skiing down a mountain beneath a bright orange hang glider, while the soft notes of Pachelbel's Canon began to play. I'd never heard this piece of music before, and though it's become the cliche of sappy weddings and no one of any taste would admit to liking it, I can't hear it without thinking of this: the man with the hang glider slid quickly toward a precipice, and Cavett's voice spoke the last lines of narration (I can't remember them, but can remember my chest feeling full, tears on my cheeks) and the music rising as the earthbound man went over the snowy cliff, and instead of plummeting to certain death, continued upward into a alpine blue sky.

Forever after that, when I ponder humankind's yearning to leap into the heavens or hear the still lovely Canon in D, I think of Dick Cavett, as if it was his voice that led me to these revalations, like a father teaching his son that one's first views on something aren't necessarily the best. That instead of being excited by falling bombs and cannon fire and dogfights, it's all right to be a ten year old boy with tears in his eyes because he sees a small beauty in this world. That it's all right to be who I am, instead of what's expected.