Bewitched.

We were shielded as kids back in the 60's in many ways. During my lifetime however there have been some improvement in equality, rights, opportunity. And yet, it can all fade away again. I see thru the lens of a wee lad watching Bewitched, and again now in my 60's. Freedom is precarious. Support your local Endora.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:12

Well, he's a rising young man, a suit and a tie. Never enough money, never enough pie. Let me say this to you and your fortunes are made on the backs of the poor. Play football in college till he blew out his knee. Took a management job, the head of a team.

SPEAKER_02 0:52

Rising Young Man. I wrote that song during the 2008 financial meltdown crisis around the planet. And it was the first time I'd heard things like the 1%, the top 1%, the very few at the top, how everybody was losing out except the people at the very, very top, the billionaire companies that got bailed out by various governments, etc. So I wrote a song in protest called Rising Young Man. I'll play the rest of that song at the end of our podcast today, The Train from Air Dream Station, episode number 14, I think. Today the title of the podcast is Bewitched. What? Bewitched. Yeah, bewitched. You examine things, experiences, parts of your life at 20 years old, at 40, at 60 years old later. Probably with each successive reflection in and on your experience, your thoughts on the experience has probably changed. I reflect now upon our acceptance of the status quo of things when I was a child in the 60s, in Toronto, in Canada, in North America. The Western liberal democracies we were raised in about fairness and equality, opportunity, the lens of our time, not long after a world war that ravaged so much of Europe and the West, among other places, obviously. We lived and live in a democracy, the rule of law. Bad guys went to jail. Not always. If I could resist the marshmallow for 15 minutes, I would get a second marshmallow. A good corporate schoolboy. Good boy. I see now clearly that life then was not quite how it appeared, how it was portrayed, particularly in the media, on television, which was my viewing experience, my lens. And it was in advertising as well. There were serious problems under the rocks, behind the curtain, and in neighborhoods that we knew little about. And in some fairness, the perspective for the adults in the room at the time, our parents, as they were working on work, paying the rents, groceries, and utility bills, well, their distraction was heavily clouded too, just getting by. Life has a way of giving you just enough to do in order not to notice much else. Life is a way of giving you just enough to do in order not to notice much else. Coffee time. Very good. Not that that excuse can ultimately hold water. People live in the times they do. Busy. Everyone's busy. Surviving getting through. In hindsight and reflection decades later, I rethink. You know, back then there was little time to reflect on inequality and unfairness and how the scale was tipped, and still very much is in favor of the very few. Very few. And the distractions for kids, for us, in the 60s and 70s, was an easy fix on television. TV shows in the morning at lunchtime when we came home from school. Grilled cheese and a tomato soup. And then after school, and Sunday morning cartoons. Bear with me, I'm going somewhere with this. Recently, I found a channel on my new Roku, R-O-R-K-U, TV. I still don't know what Roku is. Is it a TV? Is it an app feed? It is a sales conduit. Not sure. Maybe someone can tell me what it is. Reruns on this show from the 60s. Kind of cool, taking me back 50, 60 years, That Girl, Petticoat Junction, The Beverly Hillbillies, Gilligan's Island, Brady Bunch, among others. But what in particular had me rethinking, or maybe just finally thinking Bewitched. Bewitched was a popular show. It was funny. And it was wholesome, as they would say back in the time, and somewhat innocent when you look at it now. Elizabeth Montgomery was the star. Oh my god, she was beautiful. She played Samantha, and Samantha was a witch. She was a witch, for lack of a better term. And that was the premise. So she falls in love with a mortal, quote unquote mortal man, Darren, who's an advertising executive. Of course he is. They both fall in love, they get married, and then she has to tell him, you know, I'm a witch. And he's like, no way. And she proves it to him. It's kind of cool, special effects for the era. The ashtray moves all on its own as he's trying to put his cigarette. And it's kind of a fun moment. It's a fun trigger. It's a fun device. No matter what our differences are, mortal and witch. If we fall in love, things can and will work out. So there's premise one. A couple, a man and woman. Traditionally, back to the 60s now, not saying this is all right, but they get married. Gay couples then could not legally wed. Gay actors back then would hide their private lives. They had to. Everyone had a specific role. And they played with within the role. Okay, it was a very church-based, family-based, nuclear-based society with accepted roles. Everyone had a role. Back then, TV shows portrayed women, more or less, with a specific role, and men with a specific role. Now I can talk about the role of men. I was raised to believe that we would be workers, that we would be the breadwinners. We would take care of the family. My father's lifetime and my grandfather's lifetime, the men in the family. They went to church and were breadwinners. It was a traditional way of life. Fine. Darren, the character and bewitch, the advertising executive, has no real compromise to make. He just has to accept that his wife is a witch because the real compromise comes from Samantha's character. She has to stop being who she is and promises to be a good wife and not create any problems in their life. She has to hide who she is to make the marriage work. And it was so cute and fun. Oh, they love each other. She's willing to sacrifice. But that's got me thinking, what if it was the other way around? Right? I think you see where I'm going with this. Now I could not have looked at that premise the same even 20 years ago because I was too busy working on other things in my own mind. I was working, I was trying to build a career doing all these things. I was just busy enough. Life had me just busy enough that I didn't notice much else. But reflecting now. So I have a Substack page where there's a lot of writers on the Substack platform and they write all kinds of different writers. And lately I've been reading a lot of uh writers who are making notes and articles on feminism and feminism uh in their life, some some men, but mostly women, obviously. And I'm reading it and I'm looking at it and reading it, taking it in with a new lens because I've just been raised in a culture where you know men did this, women did that. And in my lifetime, that has changed, and I'll talk about that in a second. But there's some real anger in the writing of the writers on my Substack pages. By the way, check out Substack.com. There's a ton of great writers in there. It's a really good platform. There's some resentment. That's a lot. So I need to study why there's so much of this resentment out there. I need to think about it. Because what do I know? I'm just a guy who grew up in a relatively working class, almost middle class family where we had food and it was just expectations. My mother stayed home. She had a few jobs when she was, I think she was a nurse when she was first leaving school back in the day. She came here, had a few jobs. But really, my dad was the one that worked, and it was a traditional accepted life. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but women in Canada in the 1960s could not get a bank account without their husband's or their father's approval. They could not qualify for credit or credit cards without the approval of a man in their life. I I'm gonna look that up. I'm pretty sure I'm right about that. And if I'm not, someone will point it out. But this absolutely blows my mind because I was a little kid. It didn't cross my mind at the time. And now, 60 years later, as I look back, I think, huh. I may understand now why a lot of women have always been, they've had to fight for their rights and equality, just like the LGBTQ community has had to fight for rights. I understand it now. Duh. Took me a while. Apologies. It's not that the status quo is always necessarily bad, but it's so entrenched that to make changes in it requires fighting and long-term pro protests, excuse me, and long-term campaigns. Okay, so here's where I'm going with this. I grew up in a time when the traditional, quote unquote, traditional family was considered abnormal. It became the nuclear family. White picket fence, two kids, dad worked, mom stayed home with the kids. That all changed over my lifetime and is still changing now. I believe there are more women in college now than men. I believe there are more women in the workforce now than men. I believe there are more. I work in real estate uh currently as my day job, and I see far more women who are able to live on their own, buying properties post-divorce, they want to live on their own. They're okay with living on their own, just like there are guys as well, they're purchasing their own properties. I found it eye-opening for me because you know, look, I'm not the brightest spark on the plug. Sometimes it's taking me a while to get around here. But I believe I understand to some degree as a guy why there is resentment and some hostility, very much hostility, and when the politics that women have fought so hard for uh have starts to fade back into old school, quote unquote, more right-wing fundamentalists, where women are at risk of losing rights again that they fought so hard to get. Roe v. Wade in the States is a as an example. So it's one thing to be a character on a TV show and you're someone, in this case, a witch, and in her community, pretty big deal. You know, she's a witch. And Dora, her her mom, Agnes Moorhead, what a great actress she was. Great on that show. But it's another uh to compromise the entire thing, not to be a person or a partner and say, hey, I'm gonna be a witch or going to be an advertising executive or whatever that looks like. No, no, no, right. What it is is all the compromise was on the female side. And I think back to the TV shows that I watched as a kid, and there was definitely a very much a slant towards that traditional, quote unquote. And I guess that's what sold, that's what happened in Hollywood TVs, movies, etc. Now it started to change in the 70s. When I was, you know, starting grade seven, eight, nine, there was a wealth of feminist writers and feminists uh coming out and more vocal in their world for equal rights and opportunity and so forth. Right. Yeah, I said, of course. Why wouldn't someone get paid for the same work that someone else is doing? I worked in the music business for a long time. I still kind of dabble. You know, sometimes it didn't really matter if you're male or female, that uh if you drew a crowd, you get paid. I worked in the hospitality world as well for a little while. And there was a lot of female bartenders and waitresses that I worked with that did better than the their male equivalents. You know, guys tip more, you know, it's just the way things are. I think women make better realtors than men, generally speaking, and that's maybe another podcast episode altogether. Could that have all happened 50 years ago? I don't know. I was little, but I'm gonna call myself a feminist now. I'm gonna say women should have the right to be whatever the heck they want to be. Obviously. I know it's a stupid statement for a guy like me to make, but what I mean by that is if a young man wants to grow up and be a fireman or a doctor or a farmer or work on a cruise ship or whatever. Just as uh if a young woman wants to grow up and be a doctor or a lawyer or a housewife or a mother or a nun, whatever those things are, I support. Not that you need my support, but I'm tacitly, quietly giving my support. I think I get it. So we all have the right to pursue whatever we wish to, and I can't help mention that the way the world seems to have fallen backwards in the last five or ten years, hmm, I wonder what happened. Where we're concerned with the loss of our rights, we all need to stand up for the rights of others and make sure because once someone's rights go, yours are next to go. And the only people that aren't affected by that are the few, the very, very few at the top. So thanks for listening to this week's podcast episode called Bewitched, the train from Airdrie Station. I'm James, and I'm gonna leave you with the rest of the song Rising Young Man. Stick around. There's a cool part at the end where we do a little choir with four or five guys in the studio. It's a lot of fun. If you can support this podcast, like it, rate it, share it, pay for it, send me lots of money, or just give me a thumbs up. Talk soon.

SPEAKER_01 15:07

There is an angle, there is a move, more and more. It's my only group. How much is enough when does the boy rest? They bring down an empire as a way to invest. Rome may be burning, so let me cake. This was the wild west sell snake oil for you and you'd buy it. There is an angle, there is a move, all its founding groove. How much is enough? When does the power rest? It brings down an empire as a way to invest. One percent win and the rest of us. They throw a few crumbs, make you grateful. Full disclosure. This is truly disgraceful. If you're honest, decent, the hard work kind. You'll end up help. Keep this in mind. Oh, if you will make it, you can join the club. Just soon be like them and much less like us. There is a table, there is a move, and love is my only blue. How much is enough when does the power rest? He bring down an empire as a way to rest. Never enough money, never enough pie. Fortunes are made up on the backs of the board. Let me say this to you and yours. Fortunes are made up on the backs of the floor. Fortunes are made up on the backs of the board.