J:
This fifth episode of the series starts out embarrassing, and turns eventually to shit. The result was, for this young series, a surprising eruption of controversy that may have had more to do with the long-term sustenance of the series than anyone else ever realized.
Looking back on this episode these years later, I am most immediately shocked and embarrassed by my clothing — those horrid pinstripe shorts, that inexcusable purple shirt. Egads.
Fortunately, other embarrassments divert the focus. Unfortunately, many of those embarrassments are, once again, personal. Some are funny, at least to me: my response when Editor B asks me to use the word 'assiduous' in a sentence, for example. Some are just painful: see my reading from the play, “Rum & Coke.”
And then there is Copraphagia Corner. Here we attempted to show a picture that my roommate downloaded from the Indiana University vax server, which depicted a woman shitting directly into a man's mouth. Somehow, we innocently (naively? stupidly?) didn't think there'd be a problem showing this. But there was, and at the last minute Editor B had to go to the station and black out the segment. He also ran an on-screen notice, stating that the censorship was by order of the Monroe County Public Library.
Later, we would run into other censorship problems which were much closer to the grey line that separates free speech from indecency. Here we were way, way over the line. Of course, if you look around the Web, you can easily find an abundance of free pics that are much more detailed and graphic than the crappy, black-and-white printout of a crappy scanned image that we waved around in front of a camera those years ago.
