July 23rd, 2013

Tote Till It Hurts

by Wayno & Piraro

Bizarro is brought to you today by Tan-n-Go.   

I confess I haven’t watched much PBS for a while so I don’t know if they still do pledge week. Back in the day, that was always my favorite time of year. I would skip the programming in between pledge breaks and just watch the local volunteers stand in front of a bank of people on phones, improvising non-stop for god-knows-how-long until they reached their goal for that break. They would start by telling you how much they were enjoying whatever program they’d been showing (The entire I Claudius series?) then tell you how lucky you were to have this kind of programming commercial free, then tell you about the gifts you could get if you donated money starting with a box set of something-or-other (Billy Joel’s complete recording catalog?) and working their way down to the godawful tote bag you could get for being a cheapskate. That usually ate up about two minutes, then they’d start over in different words saying the same thing over and over for the next 13 minutes of the break. A great drinking game was to down a shot of Tequila every time they mentioned Sesame Street. You’d be passed out drunk inside of ten minutes. My god, it was painful watching them vamp and beg but I couldn’t look away. Sort of like watching Ali G grilling a politician.  Their misery was my guilty pleasure. I often called in and pledged money, mostly because I just felt so sorry for the volunteers in the studio. Maybe that was the point.

Being a beggar on the street can’t be much easier, but at least you can drink while you work. That’s something, anyway.

Today’s blast from the past is a Bizarro from the last century, about the other side of PBS.