Laura Linney Has TV Cancer and I’m All Broke Up

So, one night me and my wife are watching  “John Adams”  the series,  On Demand!  Straight through. We missed it the first go round. And before each episode they’re running a trailer for a new series ; it’s like a sequel. Seems Abigail finds out that she has cancer,  you know,  TV cancer,  where the doctor breaks the news to you in his office and you’re all, “There must be some mistake!” And then in the next scene you inadvertently pull out a clump of hair in the shower and you’re all, “Why me?” And then in the next scene you’re wearing a bandana—gotta love the bandana.

Cancer cinematicus has no symptoms, and no side effects from the  “cure”  either.  Oh, they smutch some burnt cork under your eyes and,  of course,  there’s the bandana,  and maybe you’ll toss your cookies just before the second commercial break but you’ll still have plenty of time,  and energy,  to cruise around town telling off every fatuous gasbag you run into. I know that the first thing I wanted to do after they told me I had cancer was to rush home and give that snooty neighbor of mine who lives across the street a piece of my mind! 

While driving home one afternoon, after my tenth,  or eleventh,  or …  hundredth CAT scan, I saw the lovely Laura on a billboard.  She was lying down, seductively,  on a soccer field surrounded by … well, the caption read:  “Time to grab life by the balls!”  Yea!  Burn the couch—you never liked it anyway.  Get busy with the old man on the front lawn.  Skydive!

Run with the bulls!

I’m sorry but I just couldn’t relate.  Maybe it had something to do with the blood-engorged hives encrusting my body like the leeches on Humphrey Bogart in  ‘The African Queen’?  Seems I have become allergic to the contrast.  I don’t know.  I guess I didn’t get the memo :  “Got cancer?  Let the fun begin!”  Like a fool I just assumed that after you get cancer your life gets crappier.  I know mine did.   

“Bob, you have stage three colorectal cancer.  If I were you I’d sign up for those ballroom dancing lessons you’ve been putting off all these years!”   

Is there any TV cancer patient whose life, before he or she was diagnosed,  didn’t really buhhh…low? Anyone who, after hearing those three little words, doesn’t suddenly feel compelled to run up the highest mountain in the world?  Or jump from a twin Otter with a parachute and another dude strapped to his ass? Is there anyone in the Screen Actors’ Guild who actually gets cancer?  Honest to God, staring at the bed sheets with a noose on your mind cancer?

Run with the bulls? C’mon.  The only thing you really want to do after you get real cancer is to make sure your cable bill is up to date and clear a pathway to the can from that couch your ass is going to be grafted to for the next six months, or year, or maybe the rest of your life.  The couch you’re not going to burn.

Why don’t they make a movie where this guy gets cancer and he has to go through this draconian slash and burn regimen of radiation and chemo and an ileostomy where he has to wear this bag that gurgles and burps and he has to empty it twenty times a day or the sludge in his bag will back up into his sawed off small intestine that’s sticking through a hole in his belly and his pubic hair falls out and he spends the next two years curled up in the fetal position and all he really wants is his old life back,  his old, adventure free,  oh so borrring life back?  All he really wants is to see that glint in his wife’s eyes again when it was so much easier to look into those two chocolate chips he fell in love with so long ago, when she was his wife and lover,  not his nurse.  All he really wants is for his kids to stop wondering if their dad is just really sick or really dying but are too afraid to ask.  All he really wants is for all of them to go to a Phillies game again and give the gschnevitz to Joe Blanton from the cheap seats. Yea, I guess you’re right.  I probably wouldn’t watch that movie either. 

 So,  should Laura burn that couch?  Turn a couple of cartwheels on her way to the infusion room? Make an appointment with each family member and friend to tell them she loooooves them?  Reexamine her life?  Try to recapture some of those dreams and ideals she had way back when?  When dreaming was so much easier and ideals didn’t seem like dreams?  Before responsibility hit the fan. 

Couldn’t hurt.

But shouldn’t we all do that?  Do we have to throw up for a year and watch our snatch patch circling the drain in the shower first?

Well, I gotta go.  My wife’s calling.  We’re late.

Tonight … it’s the mambo!

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