Allen Funt's departed and deeply missed Candid Camera, like Agent Orange, left its residue in my bone marrow.
Thousands of innocent bystanders randomly selected for public humiliation were regularly and ritually ridiculed on television by trained actors pretending the preposterous was real. A giddy blonde, for example, would drive into a service station and complain her car didn't seem to be functioning quite right. The carefully prepositioned candid camera captured the expression on the face of the mechanic as he lifted the hood and saw the car had no engine! There was no engine there at all!
How, then, had she driven in?
Come on! This was a successful, big-budget network TV show. No technological luxury was out of reach!
Another time the joke was on a man who walked into a crowded elevator and found everybody standing backwards. They were all employees of Candid Camera, and the elevator bristled with concealed cameras to catch his confusion from all angles.
In another episode, motorists entering Delaware were stopped by uniformed highway patrolmen and told, sorry, the state was closed because the "influx quota" for the day had been filled. The "patrolmen" were, of course, uniformed actors for Candid Camera. The facial expressions of those drivers, as planned, stole the show!
One more, please! A frail little woman carrying some shopping bags and an ordinary-looking suitcase came to a corner and waited for a green light. She then asked a passing gentleman if he'd mind carrying the suitcase across the street for her.
I forget how this one worked, whether it was done by clever switching of the original suitcase for one loaded with the heaviest material on earth, or by someone pressing a button and activating some kind of magnet. Regardless of how the prank was achieved, the man couldn't even budge the suitcase the frail little woman had apparently carried all the way to the corner!
Everyone who grew up in the Candid Camera era is a little bit of a nudist crossing a barded-wire fence! We approach everything a bit more gingerly than those who never saw an innocent person's bewilderment interrupted by people popping out of nowhere and shouting, "Smile! You're on Candid Camera!"
I, therefore, expect to be excused for my initial reaction when I heard of a TV reporter in New England who looked up one day - and instantly decided to spend the rest of his life teaching people to love the sky!
"For half a century," Jack mused, "I've looked up at, to, and through that thing we call the sky and have never really seen it."
There was no outer wind at that instant, but an inner wind blew Jack Borden's life off its stanchions and into a whole new beautiful, whimsical, semi-insane, but totally enriching trajectory. Without a whisper of warning to anybody, the sky and Jack's soul sneaked away and united in a matrimony as holy as any ever
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