Does art imitate life or life imitate art? I think it goes both ways. Perhaps it is like the Before and After clue in the long-running game show Wheel of Fortune.* If a television show can be considered art, a few examples from some episodes of "Everybody Loves Raymond" show similarities between art and life. This television show aired from 1996 to 2005. It focused on the dynamics of an extended family in close proximity to each other during the peak child rearing years of many baby boomers. The protagonist, Ray Barone was played by Ray Romano, a man with whom I share the same date of birth, and with whom my twin brother shares the same date of marriage. Since the show is about baby boomers it is instructive to note that 1957 was the peak birth year for baby boomers. If Ray is the main character, his mother, Marie plays a great supporting role. The show would not have some of its melodrama if not for the guise of Marie. The show was successful because it embodied some characteristics of most all families. In this way, it imitates life, and because the show has already played, and life goes on, life imitates art. Let me provide three recent examples.
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Last week we began watching part of "Making a Murderer," but desirous of lighter fare on Wednesday we turned to watching "Everybody Loves Raymond" on DVD. We have watched a few episodes over the past few nights and a few similarities are just uncanny. The first episode we watched they talked about Marie Barone doing crossword puzzles. perhaps being stereotypical of who does crossword puzzles. It just so happened that my wife was tackling a very large crossword puzzle which appeared in the paper that day of about 1500 clues, and was working on it while we watched the rerun. I of course had to laugh at the symmetry between Antoinette Marie and Marie Barone. Given that the show began airing over twenty years ago, we have aged and may are now probably closer in age to Frank and Marie, than to Raymond and Deborah.
The next night there was a similar coincidence. In that episode Frank was at the kitchen table ripping out coupons, and Marie, while cooking, commented on the annoyance of the constant "riiip, riiiip, riiiiippp" sounds being made from ripping apart page after page of what Marie said were useless coupons. Well, life again imitated art, because at the same time my wife was ripping pages out of a magazine. Never in my life did I think I would find her imitate Frank Barone. It was rather uncanny to see this coincidence two days in a row. I knew my wife likely cooked, organized (maybe better), and cleaned as well as Marie, and in those ways is much more like Marie than Deborah. I never thought I would see her be like Frank, but that Thursday evening there she was. I, of course, had to laugh. Her timing could not have been better, as Frank ripped, she ripped. Does that mean we have become like Marie and Frank and not Ray and Deborah?
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A later episode we watched was about Ray getting the Sportswriter of the Year award and then a promotion at work. Deborah calls Ray an eternal pessimist and challenges him to recognize that good things can occur without something bad following. Ray does not think that can be the case. He goes to tell his parents about his promotion, to which Marie says, it is not polite to brag. As he is leaving it begins to rain. Ray says he will look at the positive aspects of the rain and tells Frank and Marie, as he sees the downpour, "oh, the rain will be good for the garden." When he arrives home, Deborah tells him his boss called and with his new position, as head of sports features, the paper wants him to cover the Iditarod Dog Sled race in Alaska. Going to the cold of Alaska to cover a dog sled race in February would not be pleasant. Ray views it as a bad occurrence. This bad occurrence actually makes him happy since it validated his opinion that with good comes bad. My wife says I have a pessimistic attitude similar to that of Ray Barone. For example, just this past week, I have pointed that the continued forecast is for rain or thunderstorms on 12 of the next 14 days, according to the weather.com web site. I checked a second weather site and it had the same prediction. Twelve of fourteen days, and that is the same this week as last week. And, if it is not the rain, I point out how daylight is getting shorter and shorter and compare our daylight hours to a comparable day in the spring. (For those who care, and I am sure my wife is in this group, our daylight hours for August 28 at Madison, WI are 13 hours, 21 Minutes. That is equal to the daylight hours experienced on April 15 of this year.)
After all of the rain Dane County has received in the past ten days to two weeks (last week Monday night Middleton received over 11" in ten hours, what was termed in the local paper a 1,000 year storm event) and with many isthmus streets in Madison closed due to flooding, do we really need more rain? I was hoping to go camping, but the weather forecast is much the same in northern Wisconsin. Rain followed us on our last two camping trips when there was only a 10% chance, can you imagine camping when the chance is 40%, 60% or even more?
While the weather will keep us home, those coming rainy nights may well be taken up watching DVD's of "Everybody Loves Raymond." I have to think that my wife imitating one of Ray's parents on one occasion would be a coincidence, but is imitating one of the parents on two occasions, one day after the other, a coincidence? As for me, I don't think I will ever get beyond being compared to Raymond.
*Did you catch that the title of this post borrows from Wheel of Fortune's "Before and After"?
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