Tag: Jean Shepherd

I’m sure there are times when we all get to feeling a bit like little lost lambs gone astray. On such occasions, the best medicine is the rejuvenating waters of our youth. Nobody understood that better than the shepherd called Jean.

In case the name doesn’t ring a bell, Jean Shepherd was the storyteller, humorist, writer, and radio personality who spun gold from the experiences and eccentricities of his boyhood in blue-collar Indiana, which he harvested to notable comic effect. Shep was an expert at making the personal universal.

Shep lives on in annual marathons of the film “A Christmas Story” (1983), with its knowing, nostalgic reminiscences of the aspirations and terrors of childhood. References to Red Ryder BB guns and “fra-gee-lee” leg lamps are now part of the American holiday experience.

On a related note – and the reason I’m bringing this up in July – earlier this week, I recollected a television adaptation my mother and I had watched 40 years ago, as part of the PBS anthology series “American Playhouse,” of Shep’s “The Great American Fourth of July and Other Disasters” (1982). I decided to revisit it on the Fourth this year as a little birthday present to myself.

If you are fond of “A Christmas Story,” it would behoove you to check this one out too, as many of the motifs of the subsequent film are already present here, with recurring characters like Ralphie and the Old Man, and admonitions that “you’ll shoot your eye out.”

The bare-bones budget makes it all the more amusing, at least for me, as it reminds me of the super-8 films my friends and I used to make in high school. Somehow (don’t ask me how), the producers were able to get Matt Dillon of all people, already a rising star at the movies, to play Ralphie. “Rumble Fish” and “The Outsiders” were released the same year. (Dillon can currently be seen as part of the ensemble cast in Wes Anderson “Asteroid City.”)

If I were a casting director, he probably wouldn’t have been my first choice – it’s hard to imagine Dillon as Shep’s alter ego – but he acquits himself well enough as a teen version of the character played by Peter Billingsley in “A Christmas Story.” Dillon is especially funny in a tangent about a blind date.

Shep himself appears in the frame story, on a pilgrimage down I-95 to the iconic South of the Border to purchase illegal fireworks.

The Fourth of July may be past, but while it’s still fresh in your memory, you could do worse than check-out this nostalgic look back to the Fourths of our childhoods. Sadly, the program doesn’t appear ever to have been issued commercially, so it’s available only by way of a poor VHS copy that’s been posted to YouTube. Trust me, though, you will quickly adjust. It’s well worth seeing. If you’ve got an hour and you want to smile, do check it out.

I don’t know why it would have been allowed to fade into obscurity, but I suspect part of the reason is the show’s mysterious appropriation of John Williams’ music for “Jaws.” The filmmakers help themselves to the shark theme, “Out to Sea,” and especially “Tourists on the Menu,” which is used liberally throughout. I don’t know how they expected to get away with it, if they didn’t pay for it, because everybody knows “Jaws,” and “Jaws” was released only eight years earlier.

There is another reason that Shep looms in my thoughts this week, and it is a musical one, in that Shep happened to be a huge fan of George Antheil, the Trenton-born composer whose birthday anniversary I celebrated yesterday on “The Lost Chord.” Shep would sometimes play Antheil’s music during his own radio broadcasts and even provided an on-air eulogy following the composer’s death. I located a sound file here!

Christmas in July: Shep reads the autobiographical short story that would become everyone’s story when adapted as “A Christmas Story”

Of course, “The Great American Fourth of July” contains a whole other level of nostalgia for me now that I am grown and my mother is long gone. Watching it with her 40 years ago remains a happy, if bittersweet memory.